September 2020

I feel like it's important to note this is September of 2020, so it's no ordinary September. 

First, a story.

You know my neighbor and friend Jessica? She's made some mentions here in the blog before because she is practically a cartoon character. Or at least a character from a storybook.

Well, she always comes to my doorstep with wild and wounded creatures. Some wrapped in a towel, some in a box, once in a paper towel.

She finds these critters that are hurt or dying, and she takes them home and gives them a bath and rehabilitates them. 

Many of the critters are injured because her own two dogs injured them. 

Once she brought me a duck. Once a little birdie. Once a MOLE - my arch enemy. 

I said, please kill that rodent immediately, but instead she kept it in a plastic tub in her house for a few hours. But then she read that moles don't live out of dirt for more than two hours because they need to eat constantly, so she LET IT GO in her yard. 

(I was like, oooh, no you should keep it overnight.)

She brought this giant frog down to the kids yesterday. Reptiles aren't too crazy. I can get behind reptiles. Snakes, frogs, salamanders. One day there was a snake on our porch, and I yelled for little Maggie to "come take this snake home to your mom!" And so she did. She acted like it was a ROPE not a SNAKE MONSTER.

The other day she brought me a half dead mouse in a box. 

Her dogs got it and left if for dead on someone's lawn, so she took it home to nurse it back to health. 

A MOUSE. 

So, it's been like a week since that half dead mouse has been living in a box in her laundry room. She feeds it and gives it drops of water. She said it can walk on its front legs, but not the back legs yet. YET.

Oh, and by the way she has a cat. Not just any cat. A HAIRLESS cat. 

The other day, in the middle of the night, the hairless cat (whose name is Lord Business) was up doing his nocturnal hunting and found the half dead mouse in the box and took it into her closet. 

It was just in there squeaking in the middle of the night.  SQUEAKING.

So, TODAY she showed up at my front door with a POSSUM.

You see, her husband is a sheriff, and at 2:00 in the morning, he saw the little baby possum injured on the side of the road, so he said "Jessica needs this possum", and he threw the bleeding possum in his car and called Jessica and he said "I have a possum for you", and he took it to her. She gave it a bath and is rehabilitating the thing in her house right this second. 

PS Possums are nocturnal, so stay tuned to see how it and the cat get along tonight. 

She named it Tandy. 

Oh and ALSO, she does foster care...

So this little human critter is ALSO currently staying with her. His name is Royal Prince.

Sheriff Dane has arrested his mom a few times. 

Today when Jessica was out on the street showing off the possum, she was like "oh I need to get home and hide my critters because CPS is coming in an hour to take Royal for a home visit."

haha. 

You can't make this stuff up. She is one of a kind. 

And I'm only scratching the surface here. 

Other news from September:

Koda claimed that spot on the couch in the evening when we are upstairs for the night. 

Lately we play Monopoly on the Wii and it is so fun. Andrew is winning. He's a great capitalist. 

Me and Avery went to our beautiful Starbucks the other night. 

I was feeling overstimulated (ONLINE SCHOOOOOOOL), 

so we jumped in the quiet car and had a quiet evening.

Except she's a middle schooler now, so it wasn't that quiet. 

And maybe you didn't know how hip it is for middle schoolers to get drinks from Starbucks. 

Look how cool she is. 

There were a few beach days snuck into September. 

Koda snacks on cucumbers from my garden. 

She's so pretty. 

Off leash training is happening. She is smart. Smart enough to ignore my commands a lot of the time.

But overall, she is doing medium well. 

My favorite is when she heels and sits and rests right up against my leg. I feel like we are in total communicado then. 

The smoke from all the fires rolled over us for a few days. It was so awful. 

You can see it in the background of these pictures.

Hunter, Hudson and Andrew took these pictures because they are making a movie, so they were practicing. There were lots of scene clips on my phone. They are so creative. 

You can see the smoke in these pictures from the Bookmobile on Wednesday. 

Here's a fun fact about Bookmobile Wednesday: I look forward to it all week. I love hanging out there with my friends and I love getting the books I ordered. BUT for some reason, I am always in a bad mood (ONLINE LEARNING). 

I think it's kid fatigue because Lindsay is also always in a bad mood. We vent and tell the children to SCRAM! BUZZ OFF!

A pet peeve of mine: whenever we are at a fun place playing with our fun friends, my kids swarm around  and ask when they can do future fun things with their friends. Instead of enjoying the CURRENT activity, they focus on the NEXT activity. 

SCRAM! BUZZ OFF!

Then because I am so unpleasant to them, they run away from me and it's lovely. 

One day I dropped my kids off with Lisa (they all worked on a marble run), 

and took Scout with me on a run near Padden. 

The dumb dogs were fighting and playing in the car on the way there with super energy...

but I wore them down and they slept all the way home. There was snoring back there. 

On the way home from Scout's house, Koda sat right on top of Andrew. 

She acted like she didn't even know there was a little boy underneath her. 

She loves Andrew because he is always so calm and quiet around her. 

One evening we went down to Birch Bay for a sunset swim. 

Ahh look how clear the sky is. 

It's not until you're socked in by smoke that you realized what a blessing clear air is. 

This is what I call "shop dog". 

It's when Koda hangs out with Jim in the garage/front and does shop dog things like: 

sleep, stare at the neighbors, stand guard.

Evan and Andrew are taking boxing from a teenager in our ward.

 PS this teenager is 18 and has already been to bootcamp. 

One day I was a raging beast of a mom (ONLINE LEARNING), 

and Andrew was annoyed with me because I am a monster,

so he started a NO MOMS ALLOWED CLUB and got a few followers from the neighborhood to join...

including my best friend LINDSAY.

I texted her this picture and called her a traitor.

She said Andrew tried not to let her join, but she forced her way into the club. 

Here is Avery's school station. 

She's so good at school and I'm so thankful. 

This is what a clear, not smokey Bookmobile day looks like. 

And lastly, some Galbraith trails to end the blog post.

Lisa leveled up to seminary teacher this month. She is a scripture master. While I'm not one of her formal seminary students, I would say I am her student on the trails. (This year especially!) our trail discussions have included lots from the Book of Mormon mostly because she can take an ordinary scripture story and spin it into something I have never hear of/thought of before. 

NERDS!

I can't let this post go without reiterating: this year is so bonkers! 

I was telling Lindsay during "recess" on the street the other day, I feel like we are all treading water with giant smiles on our faces: this is fine! I'm fine! Everything's fine!

and the legs are getting real fatigued down there. 

Camping at Douglas Fir

Since our other camping attempt was a bust, I booked a closer camp site near Baker. 

The only available sites were in September when we were in school. But it's home school season, so we went for it. 

Koda cannot deal with being clear in the back with all the gear. She makes her way onto the kids' laps. 

I love how exploratory kids get at camp sites. 

They wander around the camp "village" and see what there is to see. 

This year they found a rock to climb. I thought it was dangerous, but no one else thought it was dangerous, so I just had to look away when they climbed it barefoot. 

We had to pump the well to get our water.

I will let you in on a little mom secret to make the mom job of camping easier. 

Don't bring a cooler full of soggy food surrounded by melting ice. Pretend you are backpacking and pack the most minimalist possible way. Bring freeze dried meals and your jetboil. No dishes. 

You can even leave the nasty roasting sticks at home. Avery spent so much time finding sticks and then whittling the points for the marshmallow roasting. It was a fun project. 

Bring your water filter so that you don't have to pack a ton of drinking water. 

And wa la! A camping trip any mom can pack for.  

You still have to bring camp chair though. I hate packing chairs, but they are a must for circling up. 

Sitting around the campfire is the whole reason for camping as far as I'm concerned.

Andrew begged for scary stories, but when Jim started telling one, he jumped into my lap and whimpered. 

So, no more scary stories.

Two of my favorite stories we told:

1. Remember back when Jim worked for Vision Airlines in Vegas? His airplane was a prop plane that flew low enough to not be pressurized.

 On his first day flying, mid flight somewhere over the Grand Canyon, his co-pilot cracked the window open and lit up a cig and smoked. 

haha. Shock value. 

2. When my dad was young and passing the sacrament, he attended a church with hard wood floors. He and his friends would go to the market down the street and buy candy before church. One time he bought some sugar babies, and to avoid the crinkle crinkle of the wrapper in the middle of church, he poured the babies into his front shirt pocket.

While passing the water, a lady dropped a cup. With the intentions of being helpful, he bent down and picked it up. One of the sugar babies rolled out and tink, tinked on the floor. Of course he then went to grab THAT, and you know what happened next...the whole pocket of sugar babies went sprinkling onto the floor making a proper racket. 

haha. 

The next morning we packed up and drove near Baker to hike around. 

For some reason I was talking about the name Sitka.

 I said: we should have named Koda Sitka. I like that name. Then we would have a Juno and a Sitka on our street. 

So then as we were hiking along, we came upon this weird plant with the red seed growing in the leaves:

I used my handy dandy app to identify what kind of plant it is, and it's called a 

SITKA WILLOW!

Isn't that great? I love stuff like that. 

We ate so many huckleberries along the way. 

There were different varieties, so I used the app to identify them. 

We had Thinleaf huckleberry and Cascade Bilberry.

Nature's candy.

It was HOT. Playing in the water was refreshing. 

We were so pooped at the end of the day, waiting for our Chair 9 pizza.

Koda jumped around trying to catch a dragon fly. 

We stopped by a market for some Sugar Babies on the way home.